Mindfulness

 

Nevertheless, Say YES To Life

I have a friend who is in great pain.  In response to my question “How do you manage each day with all that pain?” she replied “I tell myself this: you have to live the life you have”. 

You have to live the life you have.  It’s simple and profound.  Like Victor Frankl wrote, “Nevertheless, say yes to life”

This was the title of the book we know in the American version as “The Search for Meaning”.  In Frankl’s native language he wrote:  “Nevertheless say yes to life, a psychologist’s experiences the prison camps”.

 Frankl spent most of World War II in the prison camps, having chosen to remain in Austria with his parents, rather than teach in New York.  He felt they needed him in a chaotic time when Hitler took power.   No one knew that he, like many others, would eventually lose both parents and his wife by staying In Austria.  When he entered the prison camps, he was a physician and an analyst with his own particular approach to life’s suffering-with the search for meaning in the suffering, and the ability to make the choices that lead to a healthy and meaningful life.

Frankl knew before, during, and after the holocaust the deep suffering in life. 

Like my friend says, suffering is not only unavoidable, when it’s there, it is really there.  We are often angry when we hurt.  It feels unfair.  It takes away from our life.  And that impatience and anger often moves us to do something about it. 

But sometimes we cannot.  We suffer.  When we lose someone we love, we cannot go marching through death and drag them back.  We grieve and feel empty and angry and lonely for them.  We miss them and their company.  Whether we are war veterans, someone who has lost their job, accident victims, or victims of another deep trauma, we suffer, we hurt though we, for the most part, try not to.

As a therapist I know there is a lot of suffering in the world.  There has been deep suffering in my life as well.  Sometimes that suffering creates great strength, compassion and wisdom.  Sometimes it forces us to change.  Sometimes it just hurts.  A lot.  We can, as Frankl did, find meaning, acceptance, and a kind of peace.

But lately I have been thinking that this perspective of suffering gives us a deeper way saying yes to life.

When we are suffering, we cannot escape it, although we try.  It is easy to fall asleep to life, to push back uncomfortable realities with movies, tv, chores, social life, athletics. These, on their own, are not unhealthy distractions; in fact they make our lives better and deeper. It is the turning off of the self, the escape from feelings, from thoughts, from the feelings of suffering or loss.  Some days when I come home from work and there are dishes to be done, newspapers around the house, I am annoyed and complain, rushing past the chores, so I can get onto something important, like watching Jeopardy! or reading the current book.  I rush by the unpleasant as though it were unimportant to do something unpleasant, as though only the pleasant is my life and all else is intrusion.

Then, I realize this is the life I am living.  The chores, the waiting in traffic, the annoying phone calls, the to-do lists….these are my life.

Mindfulness for me means being awake and open to what is there.  When I am just angry and irritable, I move into it, listen to it, feel it and that gives me the power of choice in the moment.  Perhaps it is time to pay attention to my sadness, or sorrow, fatigue.  Perhaps it is time to care for my home, my neighbor, my mother, my child—or myself.  I can experience beauty, feel good about the gift of myself through cleaning, the beauty of the house, the making of money that sends my daughter to school.

Sometimes being awake to unavoidable suffering leads us to take on the root of the problem, to reach out to others.  Judith Herman MD recommends that instead of psychologizing away the anger of trauma, that victims may, once they have worked through the trauma, use the energy of the anger within the community, to take up the work of justice and work on behalf of creating justice.

This is the gift of mindfulness, of saying Yes! to our lives, to living the life we are given.  I am saying yes to my life, and to all its realities, pleasant and unpleasant, living it a little more deeply, with meaning. As we face our lives, in all the moments with courage, we bring a deep and abiding dignity to the everyday moments of life.